Making games more accessible with the Xbox Adaptive Controller

I’ve been fascinated with Microsoft’s journey to make, ship, and market the Xbox Adaptive Controller, an accessory for the game console for those with limited mobility to play games. And so I was thrilled to be able to include a talk on the controller at our recent GamesBeat Summit 2019 event.

Gabi Michel, senior hardware program manager with Microsoft Devices, carried on this narrative in a fireside chat at our GamesBeat Summit 2019, in a session moderated by Keisha Howard, founder of Sugar Gamers. Michel led the hardware development with the aim of being inclusive, learning from diversity.

The product started with a hackathon. The ideas flowed. The team reached out to community-focused nonprofits such as Able Gamers, Warfighter Engaged, Special Effect, and others.

Then Microsoft teamed up with those charities to find gamers with limited mobility. But Michel said that the team struggled to design something that could be broadly useful. Most of its past products were targeted at a single use case. The team couldn’t focus on just one, and so it pivoted away from the concepts that it had in the original hackathon.

And for the first time, after all the press about the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Michel told her own story about working on the project.

“I want to do the gaming community justice,” she said. “As a gamer, I want to build something great for gamers.”

Related Articles

No one has played every video game. Not even the experts. In Backlog, Digital Trends’ gaming team goes back to the important games they’ve never played to see what makes them so special … Or not. Red Dead Redemption goes a long way to live up to its name. Wearing the sand-filled boots of John […]

The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian (2012). Not every tour or museum exhibit has to be this on-brand for Ars to visit, but of course we were going to this one. Jonathan Gitlin Maybe Ars hasn’t been attending E3 (2008) quite as long as CES (2006), but we knew early on to visit […]

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Whether you want to develop your own games, find a new favorite comic, or learn the ropes of cybersecurity, these limited-time bundles are hard to pass up. PCMag.com Latest Articles